Time Machine Reloaded - November 4th

Hi TimeMachineFriends,

we already explored the November 2nd and the 3rd, now it is time for the first day of the conference ...

November 4th

The first "real" day of the conference started in an unbelievable room in the Palazzo del Capitano, which mixed both historical and technical elements. Here, we heard the welcome speak and the keynotes - especially the first one was very interesting to me.

If you are interested in any of the talks, the video streams can be found here. Unfortunately, they don't work well on my computer, so I cannot further comment on it...

However, you may notice that some of the folks (especially the people from the German community) have been quite busy during the talks. Maybe they already typed a live-transcript? ;-)

After the that, we moved on to hear Louis speaking about the state of the project in 2009. And - really great - he referred to Project Renaissance!



What a luck - Andreas and Frank gave a nice talk about the project right after. Unfortunately, the presentations files are not yet available, so you may prefer the video streams of the morning talks.

From my point of view, Andreas prepared a great presentation "to inform, to clarify, to motivate". Some people might have missed some examples, but from my point-of-view, the focus on the topic was quite right. Although the Q&A session afterwards showed, that we have to invest even more effort into communication.

For example, on person asked why we didn't work on "Macro Recorder" improvements so that everyone would be able to automate his tasks. To explain it a little bit further, Andreas talked about identifying and re-designing tasks which are important for the majority of users. For example (my example), inserting one or more pictures is a task which today requires many steps... Using the macro recorder would just mean to automate inefficient tasks which are still inefficient when used manually. And since selecting and positioning pictures still have to be done manually, that wouldn't change (or improve) that much. However, you might have a look at the videos for the Q&A.

Looking ... that reminds me that Bernhard from the Art team took the opportunity to present some of the logo ideas in one of the halls - the picture on the left. This hall did also accommodate the company booths.

After that day, we moved on to enjoy the dinner which - as usual - gave the opportunity to have nice chats with the others. For example, I would like to thank Frank Mau for his patience to explain of the OpenOffice.org tooling to me.

Besides the talks, I noticed some great wall decoration featuring some nice pieces of wisdom. You may notice that the following one seems closely related to usability and user experience in general.

That's it for today. Still, we didn't get any proposals for our workshop, so it seems quite necessary to finalize our own ones to be fully "backuped". We are really much looking for our workshop...

As usual, for the planet readers, you may better enjoy the "well formatted" posting on the OpenOffice.org User Experience blog.

Update update update: Andrea Pescetti of the Italian N-L provided a link to downloadable OGG video files of the talks. You find it here.